I'll admit, I haven't had to touch OSF/1 in a long time, and I really would prefer to avoid it, but it's not always possible. Even modern systems aren't entirel

I'll admit, I haven't had to touch OSF/1 in a long time, and I really would prefer to avoid it, but it's not always possible. Even modern systems aren't entirely consistent. As a real world example, I like to setup persistent SSH sessions on my laptop at home and personal smartphone. autossh is a nice solution to this, but it isn't available on my smartphone. To create one command across all environments that will create a persistent SSH connection, I do some OS and hostname detection to determine what I've got to work with, then create an appropriate function (either using autossh, or a more crude version using while). Then my dotfiles work across all platforms and I can keep them synchronized with git. Something like: if [ -n `command -v autossh` ]; then function ssh_persist { autossh -C -o "CompressionLevel 9" $@ } else function ssh_persist { while true; do ssh -C -o "CompressionLevel 9" $@ sleep 60 done } fi Edit: well, as long as I'm doing this much editing, I might as well make it better. To be sure, this isn't exactly what I actually run :) But it's a fair approximation and it gets my point across.